You Know We’re No Good: Moll Cutpurse, Ophelia, and Her Musically Unruly Sisters
Eric NicholsonWith a focus on tensions between moral and aesthetic connotations of “good” and “bad,” this chapter plays on ambiguous senses of these terms in the context of female musical performances in early seventeenth-century English public playhouses. It appraises how the female singing voice—even when emulated by an adolescent male—can release unruly theatrical energies, especially when sexual intrigue and musical instrumentations are deployed. Tracing post-Ophelia representations of Italianate female unruliness across noteworthy virtuosa performances by Jacobean characters, the author shows how the female musical performer is “no good” in the “best,” potentially empowering sense: like Italianate female protagonists, she switches negative moral currents to positive aesthetic ones, as both a circuit breaker and transformer of English female theatrical performance.